The Monome: A Music Hacker's Dream Instrument, and a Collector's Fantasy

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The Monome: A Music Hacker's Dream Instrument, and a Collector's Fantasy

By day, Raymond Weitekamp is a PhD candidate in chemistry at Caltech. His work involves researching energy-efficient technology and creating new methods for patterning circuit boards; he's even invented a new kind of photoresist that impresses design patterns on cutting-edge, nontraditional materials.

By night, however, he's a musician known as ingMob. And on his debut album Marrow, out this week, he uses an tool that's even more unusual than his photoresist; it allows him to wed guitars and field recordings to create a sound both acoustic and electronic at the same time. It's called a monome—a rare device that is perhaps the most organic electronic instrument out there. It's a tool as simultaneously simple and complex as his music, and one that has built an ardent community of users in the decade since its invention.

At first, the monome was meant be a multipurpose artistic tool: a simple, 100 percent open source design with buttons and lights that could be programmed to to create any kind of art, from music to games. In fact, in every functional way, it still is—it's just that the people it attracted tend to be mostly musicians.

How It Works
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A monome is a simple box, the size of a textbook (or bigger, depending how you build it), with anywhere from 64 to 256 light-up buttons on its face—it looks like a game of Simon on steroids, or a really universal remote control. It doesn't do anything by itself, and the buttons don't necessarily light up when you push them—like a game of Simon on narcotics, or a remote control you spilled a drink on.

But once it's hooked up to another device (usually a computer) via USB cable, you can use software (like MLR, the program Weitekamp uses) to tell it what you want it to do: When you press a button, the monome sends a signal to the software, which will both respond and/or a signal back to light up any number of buttons (the buttons themselves are on a completely different circuit from their light bulbs). Used as a musical instrument, the monome can split a single sample into equal fractions across a row of buttons; conceivably, you could add a sample for every row of buttons and loop them top of each other, like weaving a giant musical tapestry. It's mainly used as a performance tool, to add manual functionality to music that's often and easily automated.

It can do more than just sequence samples, though; the monome has been used by video artists for live performances, by children's museums for interactive exhibits, and by video game designers to create simple maze games. It's such a modular device that someone has even programmed software to turn it into a keyboard and connect it to your Twitter feed: Tweets scroll by in real time over the button's lights in a ticker-tape, at the same time you're using the same buttons to type out and send your own.

Clearly, this isn't the most user-friendly piece of electronics out there. It took Weitekamp months to assemble his custom version, which uses a Tupperware container, and a few years after that to truly master how it worked. (Check out the video above, in which he demonstrates the process of "aliasing" tones with the monome.)

Despite the complexity of the instrument, says Weitekamp, the structural simplicity makes the learning curve worth it. "[My monome] didn't fully work the first time I plugged it in, and I had to toy with it a lot," he says. "But it's the first instrument I've ever owned where, if it breaks, I know exactly how to fix it—because I put it together myself. So I've had little components and things break that I've been able to replace. It's more work on my end, but in the end I'm not stressing out about it. If one of my other controllers broke, I'd have to put it in the trashcan."

ingMob
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While Marrow is out now, the project's roots stretch back to 2007. That's the year Weitekamp, still in college, saw Daedelus using a monome at a club's weekly LA electro night. It turned out that the device's inventors, Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain, had just sold out of their first 100 commercial models in a single day—even though none of the new monome owners knew what they were even buying, or how to use it.

"They're kind of tricky to explain," says Weitekamp. "Nobody knows what they do. Because they can do anything. That's the whole point."

Initially, Weitekamp used his monome in its most common iteration: to make standard electronica fare. Under the name Altitude Sickness, he opened for artists like Nosaj Thing, Hudson Mohawke, and Animal Collective's Deakin, looping 808's and song samples to create simple monome mashups. But the chemist had been writing music since high school, and while he was learning how to use his self-built monome, he was playing with and arranging music for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (yes, this is a real thing). After working with others peoples' compositions for so long, he wanted to integrate the two processes to create something entirely his own.

"Both projects are ultimately about contextualizing culture and communicating personal experience, he says, "but Altitude Sickness sings through samples, [while] ingMob sings through my voice. About a year ago, I just felt this pressure to put this out so that I could be done with it mentally and emotionally … and the monome has become just another of my instruments. It was in my toolbox while I was writing a lot of this stuff. It's different from a traditional instrument because it can be anything, so it was easy to adapt it to a new purpose. [I wanted to] chop up my own pieces that I've already recorded."

(You may have noticed that Deadmau5 calls it a "mono-mee," while ingMob pronounces it "maw-gnome." Fun fact: Crabtree and Cain, in an effort to remain open source and resist the trappings of corporate branding, explicitly do not specify one right way to pronounce "monome.")

Though you might not be able to hear it in the recording, Weitekamp used his monome on Marrow alongside his guitars, looping 808 samples alongside field recordings he made himself, like on "i/o" (stream and download below), which uses sounds like rocks splashing into water and pebbles skittering across ice as percussion underlying the singer-with-guitar dynamic.

"Raymond exemplifies the type of user who is making the most of our devices by writing his own software," says Brian Crabtree, the monome's co-inventor. "He's the sort of artist who we really want to serve: [We're] trying to provide open tools that can facilitate new interaction and exploration."

"What drew me to it was the mystery of it," says Weitekamp. "I asked [Daedelus] about his, because he was the only person who was using it out live ... I talked to him about 30 seconds before he took the stage, and [then] was totally enamored with his performance and this ability to mix and mash on the fly."

The Community
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Weitekamp's is one of only about 3,000 monomes in the world. (Weitekamp says about half of those belong to musicians who own more than one, and that the number is even smaller when you factor in how many of those owners actually know how to use theirs.) The devices are intentionally rare, Crabtree says, because the company focuses on eco-friendly manufacturing—each monome uses recycled or sustainable materials and is sourced and built locally—and only sell short-run batches. (The kits from which Weitekamp built his custom monome, for example, are no longer made or sold.) Because Crabtree and Crain keep the technology open-source, other companies like Ableton and Akai (see: the APC40), Novation (the Launchpad) and Livid (the Base) have marketed cheaper copycat versions of the device. Still, the monome has fostered a close-knit community of users, one that hosts meet-ups, talks online frequently and creates monome software for each other—even for users of the other versions.

"While there is a close-knit group of monome users on the surface, these are really just the extroverted internet user contingent," says Crabtree. "I've met tons more in person at various meet-ups around the country, most recently in Madrid, and I frequently learn of musicians who I deeply admire that I didn't know used our devices."

Because they're so simple and easily mimicked (and let's be honest—expensive; the basic 8x8 model retails at $500, while the similar APC40 goes for a little more than $200), Crabtree says their company only makes a few hundred devices a year. But just ask Weitekamp (or deadmau5, or Daedelus, or anyone who's mastered and utilizes the monome in his or her creative process) and he'll tell you that, for better or worse, the simple box has changed the way their art is made.

"When the monome came out there was nothing like it," Weitekamp says. "It's so genius—it's just a grid of fucking buttons. It's a context-free matrix."

*If you're based in Los Angeles area, you can catch the first (and possibly only, given the whole chemistry PhD candidate thing) ingMob performance on February 21 at the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock. *